Janis Ilene Images

Maryland native, Janis Ilene Grau, has been working in watercolor for about twenty-five years. She was a middle school art teacher for thirty-five years, retiring to sunny Florida in 2010. In 1966 she earned a BFA degree from the Maryland Institute, College of Art. She has pursued course work at Towson University and various workshops earning credits in education and art that are equivalent to a Master’s plus 30. She lived and taught school for many years in Baltimore and on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. Janis maintains a home and studio in Ft. Myers, Florida. She finds numerous subjects for her watercolors from the natural settings in both of these coastal areas. She paints flowers; primarily, but also loves still life and landscape subject matter. Her love for the medium of watercolor grew from an early age when her high school art teacher, Jim Laubheimer, would require a weekly watercolor as homework. “He would send the class to paint “en pleine air” regardless of the weather. I can remember one winter day trying to paint the Baltimore skyline from Federal Hill, when the air was so cold that our washes turned to ice on the paper.” From this early discipline in the medium grew her expertise in technique, a keen sense of color and a desire to capture the fleetingness of nature in some permanent way. Janis is a member of the Alliance for the Arts in Ft. Myers, Florida. Her work has been displayed at various venues on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, at the Gasparilla Festival of the Arts in Tampa, Florida, at the Naples Fine Art & Craft Festival, at Art Fest Ft. Myers, at the Sanibel Art Fest and online at the American Juried Art Salon, Fine Art America and the Contemporary Art Gallery Online. Additionally, she was the t-shirt design artist for the Ft. Myers Reading Festival in 2015; as well as one of 40 artists who painted poly-resin seahorses that were auctioned to raise money for the building fund for The Golisano Children’s Hospital of Southwest Florida. Her finished seahorse can be seen here:

Her work may be viewed by appointment at her studio in Ft. Myers, Florida.

"I am following Nature without being able to grasp her…I perhaps owe having become a painter to flowers." …Claude Monet